Post navigation

After reading the covers, your suggestions seem likely. I often thought the Republicans were heading towards fascism, but I didn’t realize anyone was openly saying it. Kudos for noticing I guess?

I would still prefer we try a form of socialism first, but that seems unlikely at this point.

Malaclypse

Are these… real?

I’m hoping they were satire, but I’ll admit I’m not sure either.

rea

You mean the fascists weren’t socialists? I’m sure I read somewhere that they were . . .

njorl

Fascists are only socialists when fascism is politically untenable.

greylocks

Liberals are fascists. I saw that on a book cover somewhere.

Kamron

Yeah. And Mao’s China was a republic, right? It says so right in the name.

Halloween Jack

I would have nil trouble believing that at this very moment Tina Brown is balling up her little fists in white-knuckled rage because she thinks that someone leaked the next month’s worth of covers to TAP.

njorl

They’re real and they’re spectacular.

c u n d gulag

Newsweek and Time, the horse and buggy of print news magazines.

It’s not sad when The Onion is a better source for news – it’s pathetic.

calling all toasters

Don’t be dissing the Onion. Other than Weekly World News, it’s the only news source that will tell you the truth about the aliens among us.

Susan of Texas

Don’t forget that Newsweek hired Megan McArdle, who then wrote a cover article saying that the poors don’t need to go to college because they’ll just be waitresses anyway.

Heron

What’s sad is I’m pretty sure I’ve read articles like that last one before. On the flipside, maybe the Fark community will start getting a bit more respect now that Newsweek is ripping off our thread topics.

Halloween Jack

Fark will never get respect as long as you have people putting Lootie into every Photoshop thread just to be contrary.

agorabum

There was a recent newsweek article by Martin Amis on the GOP convention that was good.
But in an issue that had a trolling cover (mccardle, college). So it’s not all garbage…just a lot of the stuff they put on the cover.

njorl

So they decided to put the rotting fish around the newspaper.

Warren Terra

The question isn’t whether Newsweek, which is still a big deal, has some content that is good. With the slim options out there for good writers to get paid for their output, it would be shocking if they didn’t. The point is that their business model now consists of trolling the public with their cover story.

Pays income taxes and votes Obama

There was a short era between the New Deal and Reagan when there was a post-New Deal consensus on fundamental questions like the role of government. During that time a media outlet could realistically adopt a role of objective journalist and make it work because very few people had ideologies outside the main consensus. The one key and obvious exception was around civil rights and Jim Crow, and this was the basis for the southern racists – the forebearers of today’s teavangelicals – developing their distrust of national media.

It helps that this era coincided with the rise of first radio and then TV news. Because radio and TV stations used public airwaves and had far more barriers to entry than print media the concepts of the Fairness Doctrine and time set aside for Public Service were established early on and further influenced the creation of “objective” media. Thus, a single media source could be trusted by people with a variety of viewpoints – with the standout example being Walter Cronkite.

Today that is not possible. The consensus and Fairness Doctrine were both killed off during the Reagan presidency. You can’t write an objective account of anything that both right and left will agree with.

Therefore, what Newsweek is trying to do – and what CNN tried to do before – will fail. They both tried broadening their base by appealing to the wingnuts part of the time. They did get it right that in order to appeal to the wingnuts you had to disable fact-checking or any sense of balance (remember that Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck both came from CNN) – however if you publish a few wingnut articles mixed with non-wingnut articles, and try to alternate between covers that are raw wingnut meat with those that are pro-Obama, you’ll just piss off everyone. There may be a dwindling market for centrist viewpoints, but for that market you have to do take a Brooks or Broder approach to conservatism, not a red meat approach.

I don’t know that Newsweek has any good options as the commercial internet approaches 20 years old and print news magazine demand is plummeting, but this strategy will not work.

JohnR

“Is Feudalism the right choice, or just the best choice?”

“Should Moochers be put to death for their organs, or should they be allowed to contribute to the Productive Class through Work Camps?”

“Does God require us to wipe out His ancient enemies in the Middle East?”

Gosh, there are so many good, hard-hitting question for Newsweek to start working up cover stories on. I hope they stay in print for decades to come.

rm

The Case for Not Vaccinating Your Children: Do We Need to Cull the Herd?

Stand Your Ground: Should Liberals Embrace Gun Rights?

In God We Trust: Is it Time for a State Religion?

LeeEsq

Pays income taxes, I think that the idea of a post
New Deal consensus is a bit over stated. There were
decent numbers of Americans who opposed The
New Deal from the start. Southern Califonia
exhibited strong evidence of early wing nuttery
during the height of the alleged consensus. So
did other parts of the country. They were weaker but
the elements of current political partisanship
were present for a long time.

Joshua

I don’t see Jonah Weiner writing that article, simply because it’s not even up for debate in his mind.